I’m not sure why you believe I owe you a litmus test.

There is no right answer to the Israel situation, other than secular unification. You will not find me mounting a vocal defense of any theocracy or ethnostate.

So many things. But I’d start with The Ethics of Ambiguity to temper the autocratic revolution fetish.

As someone who has actually studied political science, they absolutely do not know their history well lmao. They are (shitty) Orthodox Marxists and react quite strongly to being shown anything outside of that 150 year old bubble.

They know a few core historical anecdotes that MLs cling to. But their knowledge breaks down extremely quickly when you try to reduce political science and statecraft to academic first principles, even when those principles intersect strongly with their ML orthodoxy.

They are campists. They form their philosophy around relitigating cold war drama more than anything to do with actual socialism.

My bans from lemmy.ml have all come from literally arguing that there are a solid 150 years worth of academic ideas building on Marx and that taking Marxist orthodoxy as the exclusive socialist dogma in that context is simply ignorant.

I am starting to think that they hate revisionist socialists more than actual capitalists, because it seeks to deny them the thing they really want, which is a justification for violence and totalitarianism.